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As a game dev, the not-great thing about this is that although there are instances where assets are used rarely, like tutorial levels, there's also a lot of goo
by felixgallo 11y ago
As a game dev, the not-great thing about this is that although there are instances where assets are used rarely, like tutorial levels, there's also a lot of good, meaningful cases where > 200 MB of assets are used constantly. If you have less than 200 MB of local cache to play with, then you will be constantly discarding and redownloading content.
This puts a hard limit on the top end of visual fidelity and good game experience, because the dreaded "level loading" screens that are already approaching difficult and punitive with assets uncompressing in streams directly off of local storage would now be impossible with those assets streaming over radically more limited network connections.
That said, it looks like Apple is aiming for the very casual, phone-like market for their device, especially considering the hard requirement that the remote must be usable to game with; so that's a cap too.
It'll be interesting to see if their apparent belief -- that there is an untapped market of people who want to play games on their TVs that is nonintersectional with the set of people who already play games on their TVs -- is true.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pilif 11y ago> If you have less than 200 MB of local cache to play with, then you will be constantly discarding and redownloading content. as far as I understood the SDK docs, iOS doesn't start purging downloaded assets until it's put in the position to having to download more than there is space for. So unless people have very full devices and are constantly switching apps, you won't have to redownload assets.
- felixgallo 11y agoYeah. The thing about gaming is that you have to consider the worst case scenario. If only 200MB is guaranteed per-app, then that is what is going to happen in at least some cases. If the experience of those cases is utterly abysmal because of cache thrashing, then you're going to get a lot of 1-star reviews.
- georgeecollins 11y agoI agree completely. This is Apple telling develpers how they want gaming to be on their platform. And it is not clear that this platform will be that strong a market for gaming. Apple can get away with it, but they may be squandering an opportunity.
- derefr 11y ago> that there is an untapped market of people who want to play games on their TVs that is nonintersectional with the set of people who already play games on their TVs I don't think that's Apple's belief. From what I see, they just want to take their current gaming userbase—people who own iOS devices, especially kids—and give them a TV "console" to run local-multiplayer versions of those same iOS titles, letting them re-use their iOS devices as controllers. It's effectively nothing more than a NUMA-processing extension to AirPlay.